Everything you didn't want to know about Chinese meteor lights.

You can now buy me cake and things to take apart at:- https://www.patreon.com/bigclive
OK, I'm going to confess that I was really disappointed that my first set of meteor lights came with a "safe" power supply. But having found the tubes themselves quite pleasing I ordered a load more, and ironically the ones from the SAME supplier turned up with the deathtrap mains derived power supplies.
By deathtrap I mean that what looks like a harmless low voltage power supply actually contains a beefy capacitive dropper that will happily ruin your Christmas completely if you get between the output and ground.
A really annoying feature of these lights is that the tubes all run on DC and have no proper polarity protection. So it's a bit disappointing that while the plug has a polarity notch on it, the socket is not polarised or marked. This means you can plug an entire string (or more) of these lights in the wrong way round, and if the current source is capable then it may smoke all the little microcontrollers in the tubes.

A super plus note is that these tubes will run on voltages between around 3V and 5V with varying intensity and current draw. So they're just totally hackable into custom powered strings. Even for remote locations.

A link to the seller of the sets featured:- http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/231419848646